Group exhibition

Our Fathers/ 27 August - 21 September 2012

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THE AVA GALLERY IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SPIER

Is an NPO, contemporary art gallery. The AVA gallery’s mandate is to provide a professional gallery platform, for artists and curators to develop cultural capital through exhibition exposure and critical dialogue. The AVA’s selection policy allows artists working in all media to propose exhibitions. Exhibitions are selected by the selection committee, which is made up of members, from the visual arts community. Exhibitions selected reflect a variety of perspectives, investigations and engagements, by artists and curators, working within the field of contemporary art practise.

OUR FATHERS

An exhibitionCo-curated by Kirsty Cockerill and Chantal Louw, is hosted and supported byThe AVA Gallery. The exhibition runs from 18h00 on 27 August – 13h00 on 21 September 2012.

Our Fathers engages the notion of patriarchy, as an emotional economy as well as a system that promulgates an unequal distribution of power. OurFather, another name for the Lord’s Prayer intrinsically represents patriarchy as a form of social organisation whereby society is governed by a system in which the father is the supreme authority in the place of worship, family, community, country and work environment. bell hooks states in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom “Patriarchy has no gender” and yet gender is a politically and socially coerced category, in patriarchy’s syllabus of teaching, that effects the most intimate of spaces, the family. The curators have drawn artworks from artists whose oeuvre either specifically, or consequentially, investigates the idea of “father”.

The failure of the father and the greatness of the father. The loss of a father, or abandonment by the/a father. The imagined idea of what a father is, was or should be. This exhibition presents the works of 24 different artists. The artworks have been selected by the curators, because of their ability to engage the various roles played by the father; leader, guide, military, business, home. Our Fathers exhibition is a considered investigation of the challenges faced by, or reflected on, by children of the father; the personal, the social and the political.

Lien Botha – White stick for the Arctic: Inside the house the mother did not build (2008)